Crimes against people rose in Bend last year as overall rate dropped, police say

Published 2:04 pm Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Crimes against people, which include assaults, sex crimes and robberies, rose in 2022 in Bend to the highest level since at least 2018, with 40 more than last year, according to an annual report from the Bend Police Department published Thursday.

But overall, crime rates per capita are trending down as the city continues to grow, according to the report’s data and Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz.

“Forty more people were victimized, which means more trauma in someone’s life and family,” Krantz said. “How does that reverberate through a person’s life? You never know. But for us, 40 in a year is not a giant increase.”

The department publishes annual statistics on crimes against people, property and society. Adding these categories together, the report showed a slight increase in total crime from 2021 to 2022, roughly 3%.

However, last year’s total — 5,313 — was still lower than any year from 2018 through 2020, according to the report.

During pandemic lockdowns in 2020, call volumes in many cities nationwide decreased as residents sheltered in their homes. Now, the numbers are returning to normal, Krantz said, who attributed the uptick to population growth and people living closer together in housing areas.

Still, the slight increase in crime doesn’t keep pace with the growth of the city, he said. The city reported a roughly 18% increase in population from 2015 to 2021, according to census data. The current population is about 102,000 people.

“We have not seen a crime increase consistent with the exact same population growth,” Krantz said, adding: “We have had a decrease per-thousand (people), which is a good thing.”

What’s more, Deschutes County reported fewer cases in 2022 involving serious violent crimes since at least 2014, according to the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office. In all, the county reported 208 cases defined under Oregon statute as Measure 11 crimes, which include homicides, assaults, rapes and other serious violent offenses.

“We are a very safe community overall and have a low crime rate,” Krantz said.

The department’s 16-page report provides statistics on crime, calls for service, records and evidence and hiring. It intends to provide clarity around the department’s recent initiatives and identifies priorities for the coming year.

The department’s report states it hired 10 police officers and 12 professional staff members in 2022, “similar to our hiring in 2021.” During budgeting processes since 2021, the department added a handful of new positions — a communications manager, community service officers and a management analyst in professional standards division — and plans to continue seeking more sworn officers this year.

Krantz said he hopes to hire more people to meet the demands of the growing city of Bend, but said the department has yet to determine how many more officers might be needed.

“We’re never going to add what I want,” Krantz said, noting the challenges departments are facing in hiring and training new officers in Oregon, in part due to delays at the state police academy.

“We could absolutely use 20 to 30 added police officers on a city our size, and that wouldn’t even get us to the national standards of what our numbers should be,” he said. “But we have to be really cautious and conscientious of the fact that we have a limited budget and it’s general fund money that’s shared with the fire department, streets, utilities and other critical city services.”

Krantz said the department has worked on multiple initiatives that intend to focus officers on calls that require law enforcement response, such as those involving crimes that present an imminent threat to public safety. Too often in the past, law enforcement officers were the catch-all for issues that could be better served by other agencies, and the department is trying to find ways to correct this, he said.

One of the department’s major efforts in 2022, the report says, was to decrease the strain on officers through responses to false automatic alarm calls. From 2016 to 2020, Bend police responded to over 10,000 alarm calls — often initiated by motion detectors — but over 99% were false or did not result in a crime report.

In 2021, the department responded to more than 1,900 alarms. In the second half 2022, it employed a new system for verifying and prioritizing alarm calls. Then, alarms originating from home security systems went to the alarm company to “verify” an alarm call before notifying police, rather than going straight to emergency dispatch.

The amount of calls the department received dropped significantly, from 900 during the first half of the year to 230 in the second, according to the report.

“That’s a tremendous amount of time saving and resource saving for our community, who are paying police officers to go out and do public safety and not be private alarm responders,” Krantz said.

The department is now working with the county toward another initiative: a crisis response team that would have mental health professionals responding to calls involving people experiencing mental health crises, rather than police.

Already, the department says in the report that it’s shifting “many of the current crisis calls that do not have a safety or immediate public safety issue to the Mobile Crisis Assessment Team,” the report said.

Krantz said this project, which the department expects will launch in May, could ensure that people in crisis receive immediate assistance from people who are better equipped and trained to help them.

The goal is to get “the right resource to the right problem, instead of the police always being the resource that goes somewhere,” Krantz said. “We may not be the best or right response for that person … We’re hopeful that it will help us relieve some of the stress on the system.”